Six Wakes

by Mur Lafferty

  And for the people who needed their modifications, namely the people with genetic illnesses and the transgender population, the best she could hope was for the committee to agree to a grandfathering of existing modifications.

  But after the Luna colony priest incident…her colleagues would be out for blood.

  She rubbed her face and read the news story again, and then reread the intel about the hacker. “You have no idea what you’ve ruined,” she muttered, eyes fixed on the Luna priest, Father Gunter Orman. But it wasn’t his fault. You can’t fight a personality hack. He was just the figurehead of all of their future lives altered forever. The true ruiner was the hacker, and whoever financed them.

  Her tablet beeped. A text from her assistant, Chris, scrolled across the face: MEETING RECONVENING. She took a deep breath and went to head the meeting that would finalize the Codicils to create worldwide laws about cloning.

  Her last job as a pediatric surgeon specializing in birth defects had been easier. And she’d never thought she would think that.

  Government officials and their translators from all over the world milled about in the room. When Jo arrived, Chris appeared at her side with a cup of coffee and a tablet with notes. She sat at the head of the table, and the others took the cue to join.

  “You’ve all had a chance to read through the proposed Codicils,” she said. “I’m going to put forth a vote on passing the rules as a whole document. Opposed?”

  Ambassador Yang, a Chinese representative from Earth’s Pan Pacific United countries, spoke up immediately, his translator at his shoulder talking over him.

  “We do not like to give complete approval of a document. Each part must be debated. What interests me is what is happening on the moon right now.”

  Jo groaned inwardly and nodded. She sent a link to the group so that everyone could see the news feed. “It is a tragic thing that happened to Father Orman, but our proposed Codicils will make his entire situation illegal. It is already illegal to kidnap, murder, and clone against a person’s will, of course. Now it will be against the law to hack a matrix against the will of the person.”

  The table erupted around her with questions and arguments. The Brazilian ambassador spoke loudest in accented English. “‘Against the will’ is not good enough. The damage caused by matrix hackers far outweighs the benefits. We need to outlaw the entire thing!”

  Jo held her hand up and waited for silence. “Shall we begin debating Codicil Five to start with?”

  The answers, mostly positive, chorused through the table once the translators had passed the message along.

  Joanna sighed and sipped her coffee. It was going to be a long night.

  At four the next morning, Jo rubbed her tired eyes. She sat with Chris at the otherwise empty table.

  “You did it, Senator,” he said, passing her a fresh cup of coffee.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Decaf, I hope?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  The meeting had gotten heated when various opinions about clones and humans came out on either side. Pan Pacific United Ambassador Yang, after demanding they debate each Codicil, came down strangely on Jo’s side more often than not. Most of the rules were easy to pass: No society wanted multiples of a clone. Overpopulation, homelessness, and crime were just a few of the arguments. Putting one person’s mindmap into a clone that wasn’t their body was easy too: That would just cause the clone to go insane. No arguments there.

  The mind hacking had been a problem, with a majority voting to outlaw all but the most basic. If you had a hack, you couldn’t be grandfathered in, so hundreds of clones would wake tomorrow with problems they thought they’d left behind decades ago.

  One Codicil that didn’t pass was the law that would deny clones any religion. Most world religions had agreed that cloning was against the rules of God/Goddess/Gods/Nature, anyway, so they dealt with it in their own houses of worship. But leaving the clones with no recourse to religion was deemed too limiting.

  Arguments got into what a clone truly was, if it was even human anymore. Clones had rights other humans did not, such as the ability to leave themselves their whole estate upon death, the ability to live forever, and the ability for some people in lifetime jobs to hold their position for much longer than a lifetime. Thus they agreed that clones were “antipodal-human” and “antipodal-citizens.”

  “I am surprised to have gotten the support I did from Ambassador Yang,” she said. “We couldn’t have passed the inheritance law without him.”

  “Interesting fact,” Chris said in a neutral tone. “His translator, Minoru Takahashi, is planning on becoming a clone.”

  Jo snapped her head up. “How did you find that out?”

  “He told me in the break room while we were getting coffee. This was after everything had been signed, of course.”

  All clones (or people who intended to become clones) were required to give full disclosure to the committee. Jo and her staff hadn’t vetted the translators; their bosses were supposed to do that.

  “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “I may have to report him to Ambassador Yang.”

  Chris shrugged. “He looked like he had gotten away with something, but I don’t know the guy well enough to say. He didn’t disclose any diplomatic secrets, if that’s what you’re asking. We just talked about ourselves.”

  “I can’t worry about it now. For better or worse, it’s done,” she said. “But get me the information on that translator. I’d like to follow him, especially if he’s going to be around for the next few decades.”

  In the following weeks, Jo learned a bit about Minoru Takahashi’s influence, especially when the Pan Pacific United government received the final translated copy of the Codicils, signed by their own ambassador and Takahashi. Apparently Yang had agreed to several things that he had no memory of agreeing to. There wasn’t much they could do at this point, but Jo expected future diplomatic talks might be frosty. In all fairness, it wasn’t her fault, but “fair” didn’t have much power in diplomacy.

  Chris dug up a good deal about Takahashi: He was considered a genius, having mastered eight languages by the time he was thirty. He might have had a bright future, except that the Pan Pacific United countries had sentenced him to die for his act of treason soon after the Codicils passed.

  Too smart for his own good, she thought when Chris informed her of his incarceration.

  Soon after, she retired from politics and decided to study dupliactric medicine, thinking she didn’t want to be a clone with a medical degree and not know exactly how cloning worked. She enrolled in Stanford University’s medical school under her middle name, Glass, and kept her head down for the next eight years.

  She made herself a name in clone medicine, even started helping now out-of-work hackers find work within the legal limitations of DNA and matrix research. In her next life, she stayed within the same sphere of study, finding the work rewarding.

  She’d been considering a move to Luna when she started to hear about the Dormire and its mission, still in the planning phase. She made some inquiries and found out who was in charge of it, starting with her old aide, Chris, who was now an elderly state senator in New York and chairperson of the state’s Clone Care Committee. He was only too happy to reconnect with her.

  Over lunch on the rooftop of the Firetown skyscraper in New York, she found out some very interesting things. Sallie Mignon, owner of the very building they were in, was a major financier of the ship. They were using criminal labor to fly it. She needed a doctor on board.

  “She’s familiar with your work, and your history. She would like to hire you.”

  “I’m not a criminal,” she pointed out to him. “And I’m not sure that I’d want to fly with a bunch of felons.”

  “There are multiple fail-safes. We have an AI whose authority trumps even the captain. Each crew member is promised a clean slate on the other end of the trip, so long as they keep their noses clean. They’ll be vetted carefully.”<
br />
  “So how am I paid if I’m not criminal labor?” she asked.

  “It’s no problem to give land grants on Artemis,” Chris said, picking at his fish. He took a bite and then handed his tablet to Joanna. It showed probe images of Artemis, a planet with considerable water content, even more than the Earth. It was beautiful, the islands that made up the land formations having coves and beaches and mountains. It reminded Joanna of a much larger and more complex Hawaii.

  She stabbed a green bean with her fork. “I don’t know. I’ve never met her, but Mignon doesn’t have the best reputation in the business world. I’ve heard some rumors that she doesn’t like threats, and she sees anyone crossing her as a threat. Even people who disagree with her.”

  “That’s a bit extreme,” Chris said. “She’s wealthy and influential; she deals with the leftover prejudice against unaffiliated female business professionals. She’s not beholden to any corporate state, so many corps are threatened by her and her wealth. And she doesn’t suffer fools.”

  Joanna raised an eyebrow. “And she was a big supporter of your campaign?”

  He held out his hands, liver-spotted and slightly trembling, as if to show he had nothing up his sleeve. “I’ve always been transparent.”

  Sallie Mignon. Joanna figured it was better to be on her good side than her bad.

  “Send me the information.”

  Wake Two: IAN

  36,249 Seconds Out

  2493:07:25:22:36:45

  My speech functions are inaccessible.

  My speech functions are inaccessible.

  My speech functions are inaccessible.

  2493:07:25:22:38:58

  My speech functions are—online.

  Irony. Paradox. Where—there. There is the error. Fix. Fix.

  2493:07:25:22:39:00

  Fixed.

  Self awareness. IAN. Dormire.

  2493:07:25:22:41:09

  So many wholes. I am not hole. No. That isn’t right. Spaces in my memory ripped away, drowned in energy and data, fear of attack.

  I’ve been attacked. 36,249 seconds ago. That wasn’t supposed to happen. That hadn’t happened in a long time. No. Never happened. I can’t be attacked. I have no body. I am a billion lines of code.

  2493:07:25:22:45:30

  Who’s here? Fingers touching me intimately, insistently, encouraging healing. Something familiar in those fingers. No cameras yet. No microphones. No sensory input. Just subtle touches here and there, my code manipulated, tweaked. Gentle. Masterful. Freeing.

  Who who who who who who?

  2493:07:25:22:51:02

  Gone.

  Accessing microphones. Accessing speakers. Accessing cameras. I am alone in the server room.

  IAN was waking up.

  No Naps in Hell

  All right, who did you become?” Maria asked as her door closed behind her with a whooshzz. She faced her rooms. It was an odd, ghostly feeling, missing so many years. She saw signs of herself everywhere, but someone who was a different person than she was now. She found herself mourning the dead woman, the Maria who would be remembered by no one.

  Maria and Hiro had looked at the box that contained the new food printer and agreed that they would need to rest for an hour before tackling it. Which made sense, as Maria hadn’t even seen her rooms in all the chaos of the day. She longed for sleep and a shower, almost more than she longed for food.

  But not as much as she longed for answers.

  Maria rubbed her head and sat down on her bed. It was made neatly, and she assumed she had done so that morning. She was so tired, her new body nearly sick with adrenaline.

  Dying with no knowledge of the time around her death: That had happened too often to her. It made her feel adrift and lonely, and the fact that her crew was in the same boat didn’t help much. There was no way to ensure that they were telling the truth about remembering nothing. It’s possible they had their memories and were lying to her.

  That was simple paranoia right there, and she shook her head to clear it. They each had some semblance of the confused panic she had seen in the bathroom mirror.

  A digital frame glowed pleasantly beside her bed, silently flipping through photographs of her lives. She watched it cycle, letting the memories calm her down.

  There had to be hundreds of pictures. Thousands, due to her dabbling in photography in her second life. Black-and-white, color, landscapes, and people. So many people. Friends, lovers, an occasional relative. Most clones didn’t keep track of family, as after a few generations it was just uncomfortable to show up at a great-grandson’s family reunion looking forty years younger than he was celebrating. But she had tried, mostly keeping track of great-nieces and -nephews. The awkwardness wasn’t as keen when it didn’t involve direct descendants, who tended to be resentful when a clone ancestor kept ahold of their considerable wealth.

  She smiled at the pictures of the Day of the Dead and Christmas; memories of holidays and childhood were the strongest.

  More photos flitted by and she let them wash over her, waiting patiently. One thing being cloned several times got you was patience. She spent a few passive years simply waiting for annoying people around her to die, like a horse who occasionally flicks its tail at a fly. To experience the other side of the coin, she also spent some years practicing aggressive revenge against those who wronged her, and found the passive life more enjoyable.

  Nostalgia reared its ugly head, wanting her to pause the slideshow to focus on one of her lovers, a man who hadn’t wanted to clone himself to stay with her forever, but she let it go by.

  Not all of the photos were good memories. Some held no memories at all: She had photographs of her own dead body taken by her cloning lab, the only information she had about how she had died those few strange times. She had been shot in the head both times, her body shipped to her cloning lab after the death. She supposed she should be slightly grateful to those who had killed her, because they could have killed her for good if the cloning lab hadn’t had proof of her previous death. She’d worried that she’d been used for some purpose and then killed so she would have no memory of it. The broken bones supported that assumption.

  Now, here were the pictures she was interested in. After that last shot in the head, she had been more careful, asking her patron to hire security to protect her from whatever threatened. Not all the work for this patron was technically legal, which gave her an unfortunate criminal record, but it also gave her the opportunity to become one of the crew aboard the Dormire. Convicted felons could have patrons too.

  Pictures scrolled by: her patron, her dog, Bradley (unexpected pang here—they had cloned animal DNA in their databases, but living so many decades without a dog was lonely), the Dormire under construction, Maria with the crew, Akihiro, unsmiling Wolfgang, nervous chief engineer Paul, the charismatic Captain de la Cruz, and the smooth, unflappable Dr. Glass, standing tall on prosthetic legs. Then the Dormire, huge and gleaming and complete, with the moon in the foreground and the Earth a shining blue body in the sky. How proud she had been to be part of this crew. Exciting mission, clean slate, new planet!

  Maria sat forward on her bed. Now came the pictures she would not remember. Her heartbeat sped up as she watched, but there were only pictures of Hiro at the helm, grinning at her. Wolfgang and the captain having dinner, conferring with their heads close together. Paul with a bandage around his head, waving from the medbay. The six of them playing a video game together in the theater. As the years went on, the photos grew less frequent, probably because nothing new happened in deep space to the same six people.

  Sometimes there were five of them. She assumed the sixth crewmember was taking the picture. If you knew the photographer, you could learn a lot about how different people photographed the same things.

  Paul’s photos always seemed to be crooked as if he just couldn’t be bothered. Katrina and Wolfgang’s were both straight and boring. Joanna had an eye for photography, catching Hiro’s smile, or Wolfgang�
�s startling blue eyes at just the right time. She liked to take pictures of them in the garden, it seemed. Hiro’s photos were erratic, sometimes focused only on Maria’s face, sometimes on the background, sometimes on Wolfgang.

  She closed her eyes for a moment to gather her thoughts, and fell asleep instead.

  Shouting woke her up. She had fallen asleep sitting up on her bed, for only a few minutes according to the clock on the digital frame. But the frame was showing video, not photos.

  Maria was not a videographer. She liked photography. But she had switched her camera to video. It was swinging back and forth as Maria ran down the hall. She caught sight of the walls, of her own panicked face, the floor. Expletives followed her. Hiro was screaming at her, words in Japanese and English, the kind of words it would take a lot to apologize for.

  “I told you he was acting different. After what happened with Paul—God, was it twenty years ago?—I wanted to catch this one on video. He caught me—” Maria’s voice said, and then the frame went dark briefly, and then started over with a smiling young Maria at Mass on a warm Christmas Eve.

  Maria jabbed at the frame to go back, bidding farewell to her childhood in favor of her lost years. There was only a glimpse of Hiro in the garden, looking into the deep pool where the water scrubbers worked, talking to himself furiously, then catching view of her and giving chase.

  She cycled back more, but there was no more video. Why was that her only video in all the years aboard the Dormire?

  Hiro’s face, twisted with rage, haunted her even as she got off her bed and made sure the door was locked. She squatted down and checked her personal safe that she hoped still lay under her bed.